I don’t know how this movie works. I mean, I don’t know how it works so effectively when the material is basically conspiratorial nonsense. The movie clocks in at over 3 hours, but when I watched it, it passed by in a flash. It’s Oliver Stone at the peak of his game, detailing three decades’ worth of investigative work and paranoid speculation but somehow making it more than just mildly compelling; it’s completely enthralling. If movies can earn points for creative difficulty, this one deserves enormous credit for its success in pulling off this story without making it seem like it’s coming from a bearded man shouting at you on a street corner.
When I watched it, and this is perhaps a testament to my gullibility or the film’s skill or a healthy portion of both, I started to wonder whether there was any truth to what Kevin Costner was earnestly arguing before my eyes. Then I went online and everyone was like “Yeah….no.” So that was settled. But what does that mean for assessing the film? Do we dismiss it as a fun experiment or fantasy like National Treasure? I think JFK almost belongs in a class of its own, serving as an interesting account of a type of thinking that has been all but discredited but can still be fun to think about. The complicated business comes when you consider the extent to which it could legitimately mislead people into suspecting a government cover-up and fuel even more delusions. This puts it in potentially problematic territory, but 22 years after its release, I don’t think it has had any profound negative effects.
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